Nation: Republicans: Who Are the Goldwaterites?

They wear tennis shoes only on tennis courts. They don't read Robert Welch or hate Negroes. They aren't nuclear-bomb throwers, and they don't write obscene letters to editors who disagree with them. They are reasonably well-educated and informed. They are, in fact, nuts about Barry Goldwater without being nutty in the process.

These are the citizens who make up the great majority of Goldwater's following. As such, they are the troops in a middle-class revolution that borrows from Populism, has a strong desire to maintain the economic and social advances it has achieved, looks with deep concern at the moral decline of the country, has geographical definitions and strong religious and patriotic overtones. The movement injects a new thrust into U.S. politics; and win, lose or draw in November, that thrust will be felt for a long while.

Goldwater's nomination was much more than the victory of "a minority within a minority." It signaled a basic shift in the Republican Party from its power base in the Northeast and Great Lakes states to a Southern-and Western-oriented geographical foundation that spreads from the Great Plains to the Pacific Coast.

Impact in Suburbia. The revolution has been a long time brewing. As Cornell Political Scientist Andrew Hacker puts it: "The new conservatism is the result of the democratic process itself; the widening of new opportunities for millions of Americans who have risen to a better location in life and who at all cost want to ensure that they remain there." Accordingly, many Goldwater admirers are middle-class "haves"—a fact that was obvious in the crowds of well-dressed, well-behaved men and matrons who showed up at receptions for their man all over San Francisco.

The impact of the revolution is most obvious in the burgeoning suburbs of the South and the West that are luring the skilled technicians and the professional men, many of them from farms and from low-income families that traditionally voted Democratic.

The Fed-Up Federation. In a sense, the Goldwaterites belong to what Atlanta Constitution Editor Eugene Patterson calls a "federation of the fed-up." They are fed up with the portents of economic, social and moral decay they see across the U.S., particularly in its crime-infested cities. They are fed up with big government and big spending, with a bland foreign policy and with America's failure to use its power abroad.

"Every damned time I turn around," says Panama City, Fla., Scrap Dealer Joe LeSuer, a disillusioned Democrat, "there's some federal man in here telling me what I've got to do. Hell, I spend 60% of my time making out infernal forms that if I don't make out they can arrest me for." To Chicago Industrialist Robert Galvin, chairman of Motorola Inc., it amounts to a resistance to being "averaged down."